Animal intelligence

As researchers continue to document the intelligence and emotional acuity of animals, beasts begin to look more like brethren, and food more like friend. On Pharyngula, PZ Myers shares a decision by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that gives chimpanzees used in research the same endangered status as their wild cousins. According to Science, "organizations that want to continue working with chimpanzees will have to document that the work enhances the survival of the species and benefits chimps in the wild." PZ writes, "I want to see more studies done on our closest relatives — but it has to…

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. We humans aren't used to having our intelligence challenged. Among the animal kingdom, we hold no records for speed, strength or size but our vaunted mental abilities are unparalleled. But research from Kyoto University shows that some chimps have a photographic memory that puts humans to shame. In 2007, Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzawa found that young chimps have an ability to memorise details of complex images that is literally super-human. Boffin chimp Ayumu, outperformed university students in…

Octopuses are masters of camouflage that can change their shape, colour and texture to perfectly blend into their environment. But the soft bodies that make them such excellent con artists also make them incredibly vulnerable, should they be spotted. Some species have solved that problem with their fierce intellect, which allows them to make use of other materials that are much harder. The veined octopus, for example, dons a suit of armour made of coconut shells. The veined octopus (Amphioctus marginatus) lives in sandy, exposed habitats that have little in the way of cover. To protect…

At first glance, the African elephant doesn't look like it has much in common with us humans. We support around 70-80 kg of weight on two legs, while it carries around four to six tonnes on four. We grasp objects with opposable thumbs, while it uses its trunk. We need axes and chainsaws to knock down a tree, but it can just use its head. Yet among these differences, there is common ground. We're both long-lived animals with rich social lives. And we have very, very large brains (well, mostly). But all that intelligence doesn't come cheaply. Large brains are gas-guzzling organs and they need…

There is a deep hole in a tree trunk and within is a tasty dollop of sweet, nutritious honey. It's a worthwhile prize for any animal skilled or clever enough to reach it, and chimpanzees certainly have both of these qualities. But the solutions they find aren't always the same - they depend on cultural traditions. Chimps from the Sonso community in Uganda are skilled at the use of sticks and unsurprisingly, they manufacture stick-based tools to reach the honey. Chimps from the Kanyawara community in a different part of Uganda have never been seen to use sticks in the wild. Instead, they…

This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material. It's tempting to think that elephants have their own PR agency. Just last week, their mighty reputation was damaged by the revelation that they are scared away by bees but they have bounced back with a new study that cements their standing among the most intelligent of animals. Lucy Bates and colleagues from the University of St Andrews have found that African elephants (Loxodonta africana) can tell the…

Aesop's fable "The Crow and the Pitcher" has been confirmed in a wonderful experiment. In the classic tale, a thirsty crow uses stones to raise the level of water in a pitcher until it rises within reach of its beak. This is no mere fiction - rooks, close relatives of crows, have the brains to actually do this. The aptly named Chris Bird, along with Nathan Emery, gave four captive rooks (Cook, Fry, Connelly and Monroe) a chance to reach a small worm floating in a cylinder of water, with nothing but a small pile of stones sitting on the side. All of them solved the task, and Cook and Fry…

You don't have to be particularly intelligent to use tools - many animals do so, including some insects. But it takes a uniquely intelligent animal to be able to combine different tools to solve a problem. We can do it, the great apes can do it, and now the New Caledonian crow joins our exclusive club. Animals can use tools using little more than pre-programmed behaviour patterns that require little intelligence. But combining tools, or using one tool on another (a metatool, if you will), is a different matter entirely - that takes reasoning. This type of intelligence has been the engine…

Chimps are known to make a variety of tools to aid their quest for food, including fishing sticks to probe for termites, hammers to crack nuts and even spears to impale bushbabies. But a taste for honey has driven one group of chimps in Gabon's Loango National Park to take tool-making to a new level. To fulfil their sweet tooth, the chimps need to infiltrate and steal from bee nests, either in trees or underground. To do that, they use a toolkit of up to five different implements: thin perforators to probe for the nests; blunt, heavy pounders to break inside; lever-like enlargers to widen…

While the rapid expansion of human cities has been detrimental for most animals, some have found ways of exploiting these brave new worlds and learned to live with their prolific inhabitants. The Northern mockingbird is one such species. It's very common in cities all over America's east coast, where it frequently spends time around humans. But Douglas Levey from the University of Florida has found that its interactions with us are more complex than anyone would have guessed.  The mockingbird has the remarkable ability to tell the difference between individual humans, regardless of the…

For many animals, living with others has obvious benefits. Social animals can hunt in packs, gain safety in numbers or even learn from each other. In some cases, they can even solve problems more quickly as a group than as individuals. That's even true for the humble house sparrow - Andras Liker and Veronika Bokony from the University of Pannonia, Hungary, found that groups of 6 sparrows are much faster at opening a tricky bird feeder than pairs of birds. After ruling out several possible explanations, the duo put the speedy work of the bigger flock down to their greater odds of including…

For humans, our culture is a massive part of our identity, from the way we dress, speak and cook, to the social norms that govern how we interact with our peers. Our culture stems from our ability to pick up new behaviours through imitation, and we are so innately good at this that we often take it for granted. We now know that chimpanzees have a similar ability, and like us, different groups have their own distinct cultures and traditions. Now, Andrew Whiten from the University of St Andrews has published the first evidence that groups of chimpanzees can pick up new traditions from each…

Say the word 'statistician' and most people might think of an intelligent but reclusive person, probably working in a darkened room and almost certainly wearing glasses. But a new study shows that a monkey in front of a monitor can make a reasonably good statistician too. Tianming Yang and Michael Shadlen from the University of Washington found that rhesus macaques can perform simple statistical calculations, and even watched their neurons doing it. Psychologists often train animals to learn simple tasks, where the right choice earns them a reward and the wrong one leaves them empty-handed…

In 1997, Swedish inspectors found several stockpiles of missiles hidden in a local zoo. Apparently, the arsenal had been gathered together for the express purpose of being used against civilians. And who was the mastermind behind this collection? A 19-year-old chimpanzee called Santino. Santino was born in a German zoo in 1978 and transferred to Furuvik Zoo at the age of 5. To this day, he lives in the zoo's chimpanzee island - a large outdoor enclosure surrounded by a moat. Throughout his residence, he was mostly docile towards the eager visitors, but all of that changed in 1997 when he…

In the Goualougo Triangle of the Republic of Congo, a chimpanzee is hungry for termites. Its prey lives within fortress-like nests, but the chimp knows how to infiltrate these. It plucks the stem from a nearby arrowroot plant and clips any leaves away with its teeth, leaving behind a trimmed, flexible stick that it uses to "fish" for termites. Many chimps throughout Africa have learned to build these fishing-sticks. They insert them into termite nests as bait, and pull out any soldier termites that bite onto it. But the Goualougo chimps do something special. They deliberately fray the ends…

From the carpenter choosing the right strength of drill, or the artist selecting the right weight of pencil, humans have a natural talent for picking the right tool for the job. Now, it seems that monkeys are similarly selective about their tools. In the first study of its kind, Elisabetta Visalberghi from the National Research Council, Italy, found that capuchin monkeys are able to pick stones with the right properties for nutcracking. Capuchins often use stones to crack otherwise impenetrable nuts upon hard, flat surfaces, turning innocuous forest objects into their own hammers and anvils…

In Shark Bay, off the Western coast of Australia, a unique population of bottlenose dolphins have a unusual trick up their flippers. Some of the females have learned to use sponges in their search for food, holding them on the ends of their snouts as they rummage through the ocean floor. To Janet Mann at Georgetown University, the sponging dolphins provided an excellent opportunity to study how wild animals use tools. Sponging is a very special case of tool use - it is unique to Shark Bay's dolphins and even there, only about one in nine individuals do it. The vast majority of them are…

Animals often show a keen intelligence and many species, from octopuses to crows, can perform problem-solving tasks. But humans are thought to go one step further. We can reflect on our own thoughts and we have knowledge about our knowledge. We can not only solve problems, but we know in advance if we can (or are likely to). In technical terms, this ability is known as 'metacognition'. It's what students do when they predict how well they will do in an exam when they see the questions. It's what builders do when they work out how long a job will take them to finish. But can animals do…

In the Ivory Coast, a small stream called Audrenisrou winds its way through the lowland rainforest of the Tai National Park. On the floodplain of this stream, at a site called Nuolo, lie several stones that seem unassuming at first glance. But to the trained eye, they are a window to the past. Their shape is different to other stones that have been worn away by natural erosion. They have been flaked in systematic ways and many are flattened and sharp. Clearly, they were shaped by hand for a purpose - they are tools. Their creators were not humans, but close relatives who lived in these…

Looking at Britain's overcrowded prisons, Wembley stadium or the continual dithering over solid climate change policies, it would seem that many of us are really quite bad at planning for the future. Even so, most of us can still do it (even though some may do it very badly). This abilty isn't there from birth; children only develop a sense of a future at the age of two and they can only plan for it from four or five. But eventually, everyone picks up the skill and up till recently, scientists believed that we were the only species that did. Many animals show behaviour that could be…